Embervault

"The city that refused to cool."

Overview

Embervault is the rebellious forge-city of eastern Canava — a smoldering red wound in Serendahl’s immaculate reflection.
Built within the hollow of a dormant volcano, it glows with rivers of molten light and the constant rhythm of invention.
To the rest of Canava, Embervault is dangerous — a city of motion in a world meant to stand still.
To its citizens, it is holy ground: the only place left where creation is still allowed to breathe.
Serendahl’s priests condemn Embervault’s work as blasphemy, yet the continent cannot survive without its forges.
Every ship, engine, and cannon in Silverwake bears a spark from this city — the heart that Serendahl’s doctrine could not extinguish.

Geography & Setting

• Location: Beneath the Glass Range, on the eastern edge of Canava.
• Landscape: A volcanic caldera lined with molten canals, vent-spires, and metal catwalks suspended above glowing rivers.
• Architecture: Iron domes, rotating chimneys, and towers of glass reinforced with brass ribs.
The city is always in motion — pistons pumping, cranes shifting, gears humming — as if even the walls refuse to stay still.
• Population: Goblins, gnomes, humans, salamander-skinned artisans, living constructs, golems, elementals, and one brass dragon banker who guards the molten vault.
Government & Society
Embervault operates as a technocratic syndicate known as the Council of Sparks — twelve guildmasters chosen for innovation, not lineage.
Every three months the Council burns the previous session’s decrees, symbolizing that no law is permanent, and no progress should ossify.
Their unofficial patron and final arbiter is Cindermark the Reforged, a brass dragon who manages the city’s treasury within the volcano’s heart.
He is not a ruler but a moderator — ancient, calculating, and terrifyingly pragmatic. His ledger glows brighter than any sermon in Canava.

Faith & Philosophy

Embervault has no official deity, yet every forge and workshop hums with something close to worship.
Where Serendahl’s followers pray for stillness, Embervault’s citizens pray for ignition.
Core Tenets of the Embervault Philosophy:
• Motion is sacred. Stillness is decay.
• To create is to honor the spark that made the world.
• Perfection is not achieved — it’s pursued.
• Fire is the truest mirror: it changes everything it touches.
Their leaders are the Antipriests of Motion — mystics and machinists who speak inverted prayers, using resonance and rhythm to weaken Serendahl’s influence on local reality.
They don’t curse her; they simply outwork her.
To the rest of Canava’s faithful, these rituals are heresy.
To Embervault, they are physics.

Economy & Currency

Embervault’s economy is a living system — unstable, luminous, and defiantly alive.
Currency: Heatnotes — thin strips of copper-gold alloy whose value changes with temperature.
They rise in worth during the day and fall at night, an intentional rejection of Serendahl’s law of constancy.
This volatility turns commerce into a game of motion — part engineering, part gambling, and wholly irreverent.
Cindermark’s Vault:
Beneath the volcano lies the molten bank where all Heatnotes are minted, melted, and reborn.
Cindermark himself decides their relative value, occasionally “misplacing” gold or altering ledgers as a philosophical protest against stillness.

Faithful Rejection:

Silverwake’s Senate has outlawed coinage entirely, claiming it tempts chaos.
True Serendahlians trade only in goods and services, rejecting the concept of currency as a sin against divine equilibrium.
But Embervault refuses to stop minting coins — round, shining, and intentionally reminiscent of the forbidden Coin on Its Edge.
Their defiance turned faith into finance, and their rebellion into the stock market.

The Stock Crypt

Deep beneath the vault lies the Stock Crypt, where glowing obelisks display Heatnote fluctuations in real time.
Traders in heatproof suits wager fortunes while standing in literal magma light.
It functions like a chaotic stock exchange — part sacred rite, part gambling hall.
The crypt hums with whispering metal, as if Serendahl herself were gnashing her teeth beneath the floor.

Trade & Relations

Thorgun: Purchases Embervault’s engines and molten tools for Heartroot excavation. Troll miners consider Embervault steel blessed for its endurance.
Port Chimera: The pirates’ favorite marketplace — until the bank undervalues their gold. Many a brawl has ended with molten breath settling the argument.
Harlequin Vale: The flamboyant trade arm of Embervault. Alon, a bombastic cannon-merchant from the Vale, advertises:
“If it can fire a man, it can fire a cannonball — made in Embervault.”

Political Tension:

The Canavan Senate needs Embervault’s output but despises its independence.
Serendahl’s clergy call it a blight; Silverwake’s generals call it indispensable.
The relationship persists like a forge’s fire under a cracked bell — contained, but never safe.

Military & Engineering

Though Embervault has no standing army, its machines form the backbone of Canava’s military.
They design what the sanctifiers forbid to exist.

Major Contributions:

• Mirror Engines: Compact fusion cores powering Silverwake’s warships.
• Ardent Line Rifles: Resonant weapons that channel harmonic combustion through Mirrorsteel.
• Automaton Smiths: Sentient constructs for field repair and construction.
• Corona Wall: A defensive heat barrier that can encase the entire volcano in blinding light; activated only once, during a failed Sanctifier purge.
While the Sanctifiers of Stillness fight to freeze the world in place, their armor, engines, and ships are built by the heretics they would burn.
No soldier in Silverwake dares mention this irony aloud.

Culture & Daily Life

• Every household keeps a small forge or heatstone — to let it go cold is bad luck.
• Invention is treated as meditation; even children tinker before they can write.
• Gnomes and goblins run most of the workshops; salamanderfolk work the heat-lines; constructs act as scribes and assistants.
• Festivals of Ignition mark the start of every season: citizens melt down a broken tool to forge something new from its ashes.
• The arts favor kinetic sculpture, molten glasswork, and poetry written in sparks on black iron.
Common sayings:
• “Mistakes keep the goddess away.”
• “A cooled forge is a coffin.”
• “If it moves, it lives.”
• “Stillness is the enemy of soul.”

Notable Figures

• Cindermark the Reforged — Brass dragon banker, ancient economist, and embodiment of liquidity.
• The Council of Sparks — Twelve-member guild syndicate, constantly rotating.
• Master Lume Jarra — Antipriest of Motion; preaches the “Liturgy of Sparks,” a manifesto against divine stagnation.
• Tig Varnash — Goblin machinist who invented the walking forge-engine.
• Tessaline Quill — Salamander diplomat who manages negotiations with Silverwake’s Senate.
• Rook & Tatter — Human-construct twins who run Embervault’s black-market prototype exchange.

Cultural Conflict

Embervault exists in open philosophical defiance of Serendahl’s order.
To the faithful, it is a blasphemous scar.
To the pragmatic, it is civilization’s lifeline.
If Serendahl ever succeeded in freezing the world, Embervault would be the first to melt free.
“Stillness is for statues,” says Lume Jarra.
“We make gods that move.”